Thing 2: I’ve got a little series of e-books going. The first is Ambrosii, out now from Amazon worldwide. The second one, dubbed Monsters, is slated for release in October. I’m shooting for one of these a month for a while. Each one will be an experiment, in some way, so I’d be interested to hear your comments (at Facebook or Livejournal).

Rene Sears interviewed me for today's edition of the Pyr newsletter, Pyr-A-Zine, in which I sound off on political systems in fantasy, history (true or feigned), what is and is not a trilogy, and the proper way to eat a sandwich through your nose. (Well, everything except that last part.)

Nowadays the hideous murder of a child needs something special to get noticed--it has to occur at a midnight showing of a Batman™ movie, or involve Cheez Whiz™, or something™. Then it can grab our attention. Otherwise it's just one of those awful but expectable things that happens sometimes, like a politician lying.

The world wasn't actually more innocent in the 19th century--but it sometimes pretended it was (and that's the essence of Victorianism, I guess). In 1860 a young boy was taken from his family's English country house and brutally murdered, not necessarily in that order. The physical evidence immediately showed that someone inside the household must have killed the boy--that the murderer was possibly a member of his own family. The country was shocked... and fascinated.

David Sirota suggests that the crime be declared as "terrorism". His point is that right-wing bozos who shoot people are classified as loonies, whereas others (especially if they're non-white or Muslim) are terrorists.

Maybe so, but it seems premature to claim that's what was going on in Aurora.

I almost called them a "random acts of violence" but decided against that for two reasons. The first is merely stylistic: avoid clichés, right?

But the second is that it wouldn't be true.

These acts were not random. This was a carefully planned, well armed, capably conducted attack.

And the occasion probably wasn't random, either. The suspect was dressed in black when he was caught, and he committed his murders at the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. Doesn't it seem likely that the occasion itself attracted him? That he saw himself as a kind of dark knight, or at least as a super-villain?

Who knows? Maybe his Plan A was to attack a big-screen viewing of My Little Pony, but he settled for Batman instead.

Still: I'm haunted by the thought that his dark violent actions were attracted and focused by the dark violent fantasy of the film.

Probably futile to fight against a sticky idea simply on the basis of its falsehood, but here goes.

President Obama said something last week about success which was not only true, but obviously true. Then some people pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, invented the internet and started blogging about it, and today the truth has become a falsehood used as an attack line. That’s politics, I guess, but the business seems important for a couple of reasons.

Here’s the quote in context, from a campaign stop in Virginia. The quote comes from about 53 minutes into the event; I’ll try to paste a shorter clip into the message below. But here are the ipsissima verba.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, “You know what, there are some things we do better together.”

There are two reasons why this matters to me–one trivial, one essential.

One is that I have a bad habit of using pronouns with unclear antecedents. This is a cautionary tale about that. Obama is clearly talking about the infrastructure created by the community, but the “that” allows people to pretend otherwise, as long as they shear away the context.

More importantly, if what Obama says here were not true, human civilization would be impossible. He is simply describing things as they are. If that is, in fact, in dispute (like evolution, global warming, and a range of other realities that partisan hysteria has managed to make controversial), then we’re all in trouble.

And conservatives need to worry as much or more than liberals. No matter how convenient it may seem as an electoral tactic, an ideology in conflict with the very idea of community can’t be used as a basis for governing a community.